The most successful RTC projects all have a convenient means of user provisioning.

In an office environment, this may mean that the softphone or desk phone is automatically configured for the user by a system administrator. Chapter 14, Client devices and softphones discusses the provisioning facilities of some types of phone.

For a generic SIP service, an ISP or a corporate/campus environment with a bring-your-own (BYO) device policy, the ideal setup process should only require the user to enter their SIP/XMPP address and their password and the softphone/device should discover all other parameters using DNS NAPTR and DNS SRV queries. For this to be effective, softphones and devices aiming to be used in this way need to ensure they have suitable codec and encryption settings enabled by default so the user won't have to tweak them as recommended in Chapter 4, Optimizing Connectivity.